New music roundup: La Sera, Repeat After Me, The Fresh & Onlys and The Plastics

Wednesday

May 14, 2014 at 5:48 PMMay 14, 2014 at 5:52 PM

“Losing to the Dark,” the first single from La Sera’s new album “Hour of the Dawn,” unfolds itself like a package: first a gloomy fog of sound, followed by a grungy industrial grind, then finally a bright, vibrant blast of pop energy.

But as upbeat and indelibly catchy as this song is, there’s a darkness underlying the whole thing, one that threatens to engulf both the singer and the song. When the song turns, it turns hard.

“How ’bout you write another song,” sings vocalist Katy Goodman, “about how fun you are to drink with at the bar.”

That the song never loses its verve as the portrait gets more and more destructive only serves to further distort the portrait, lending the whole thing an uneasy funhouse mirror sort of effect. It’s a highly addictive song, and one with a few very serious things to say.

Likewise, “Mapmaker” by the band Repeat After Me takes its time revealing what it is. The synth pop song — which appears on the title track to the band’s second album, which is out this week — starts in a strangely disembodied place, with a guitar line weaving its way through sampled speech and static for more than a minute.

Mapmaker by Repeat After Me

When the real song reveals itself, the mapmaker of the title is exposed as being lost and isolated, his home no longer existing and everything else crumbling around him, the chorus ending with the words, “All he can do is draw on.” It’s a surprisingly sad little song, but one that has a great deal of texture and feeling.

Finishing out a stretch of great indie music, The Fresh & Onlys have a song that’s equal parts dark and delectable with “Who Let the Devil”:

There’s a weariness in the song, a sense of exhaustion that radiates from the opening lines: “Who let the devil walk into my house when I was born dyin'?" It’s a classic blues motif set to a more contemporary sound, and it works remarkably well.

Lastly, some songs are only noteworthy for their sheer awfulness, and “The Plastics,” by the band of the same name, would be pretty much at the top of that list. The band, according to the band’s YouTube page, are “Toby Sheldon – the man who underwent $100,000 worth of plastic surgery to look like Justin Bieber, Venus D'Lite – a contestant on ‘RuPaul's Drag Race’ who has spent thousands to look like her idol Madonna, and Kitty Jay, who spent $25,000 to look like Jennifer Lawrence.”

The song also features Adam Barta, who co-wrote the lyrics, but I’m not entirely sure why anyone would admit to that. Aside from being an ear-achingly Auto-Tuned mess, the song itself is strange sort of attempt to vindicate the singers’ expensive and, frankly, kind of creepy cosmetic surgery. There’s something oddly stalkerish about the whole thing, and it makes me terribly uncomfortable. Hopefully, that’s the point, but I’m not getting a sense that this crew is that self-aware. (Victor D. Infante)